The Truth About Neoconservative Pence and Interventionist Kaine

Whether it is Clinton (disaster) or Trump (despair), Americans are in for a bigger, more intrusive, fiscally irresponsible, hawkish government.

In 1778 (nine years before the Constitution), in the third year of America’s independence, John Hancock, Sam Adams, Eldridge Gerry, Roger Sherman, John Dickinson, and Richard Henry Lee, among others of our country’s early Founders, signed the original Articles of Confederation.

The Articles called for a perpetual union between the 13 states. Each state was to retain its “sovereignty, freedom and independence.” The states entered into a league of friendship with each other, for their common defense and for the security of their liberties.

No “body of forces’ was to be kept up by any state in time of peace.

Our small central government, states rights centric Founders were not interventionists in the affairs of other countries.

So what of Trump’s and Clinton’s vice-presidential picks? For starters, they are both hawkish.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was an apt pupil of Bush and Cheney during the neoconservative years, voting for the Iraq War in 2002 and serving as one of David Petraeus’s cheerleaders in favor of the 2007 surge. He has since supported every intervention his fellow Republicans did, even giving early praise to Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration for the 2011 intervention in Libya.

On the other side, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is as far from the Bernie Sanders mold as they come: a centrist Democrat who supports a muscular, liberal-interventionist foreign policy, and who has been pushing for greater intervention in Syria, just like Hillary Clinton.

I doubt the founders would have found much to support here, at least as Vlahos outlines things.